Joost Swarte’s Blind Mice

The Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte provided the drawings for “Thrice Told Tales: Three Mice Full of Writing Advice,” by Catherine Lewis, a creative-writing professor. In the book, Lewis sets out to explain literary elements such as metaphor and suspension of disbelief through variations on the classic nursery rhyme, “Three blind mice ran after the farmer’s wife. She cut off their tails with a carving knife.”

For the Dutch edition of the same book, Swarte, who’s in town this week for the MoCCA Arts Fest, decided to create endpapers that would explain the entire nursery rhyme. I asked him to put some of his visual choices into words:

First I wondered, Why are the mice blind? We don’t know, but the words don’t tell you why, so I decided the image doesn’t need to, either.

Next came, How do I make her a farmer’s wife? Well, I drew a farm, so the man holding a pitchfork is a farmer and the woman his wife. I gave her farmer’s overalls, but I had to put her in high heels to make her a lady—otherwise you’d have seen a long-haired guy.

Then how do I represent blind mice? I first thought of drawing crosses for the eyes but realized they could have been seen as drunk rather than blind. So I gave them dark glasses. In the book, one of them is a girl, so she has a necklace and Audrey Hepburn glasses.

That’s the first line of the rhyme, so the first endpaper. In the back comes the second one.

The broom has a leaf growing out of the handle to show you the farmer’s wife doesn’t much like to clean. There is Grant Wood’s painting, “American Gothic”—farmers are important in America. And I put in a mouse hole to save the mice from the violent behavior of the farmer’s wife.

As to why they were chasing the farmer’s wife? The story doesn’t tell us. They just do.

See below for some more illustrations that Swarte made of literary concepts. Meanwhile, the Society of Illustrators is presenting a show of his work. He’ll appear on a panel with Art Spiegelman on Saturday, and will talk about “Comics, Illustration and the Conceptual Image” on Sunday.